With some vehicles ditching gas for other fueling options, what happens to the neighborhood gas station? Photo: Johnny Hanson / Houston Chronicle

The state, and Houston in particular, is blessed with relatively cheap access to natural gas and electricity, so shifting to natural gas cars or plug-in vehicles that can charge at home is feasible as soon as we build a little more infrastructure.

So what happens to gas stations? Sure, we’ll need a lot of them for a long time to come. But eventually, as people charge at home, we might see some decline in the number of gas stations. With one about every quarter-mile along most commercial corridors in Houston, any significant loss is going to open up a lot of real estate.

Some might make the switch and offer natural gas, even though that’s going to be a complex process. Others might hang on simply selling soft drinks and cigarettes as they do now, just minus the gas pumps. The world will always need Big Gulps.

It’s going to be a long time before any of this comes to pass, and by then maybe some creative uses will crop up and the region isn’t left with a lot of blocks of blight to clean up or just reclaim for parking.